Know your past live your future

THE POET: 'I discovered Hart Crane because of an arrow. Specifically, an arrow painted in the bottom-right of Periscope, a Jasper Johns painting that I’d seen at an exhibition, aged nineteen. A perfunctory note explained that the arrow was a tribute to Crane, a modernist poet who’d ended his life by throwing himself from the deck of a steamer ship.'

PUNK WRITER: 'For some, discovering the work of American writer Dennis Cooper, is something akin to a queer rite of passage. Like so many Cooper fanboys, I found his novels when I was in my late-teens slash early-twenties, in the midst of my own sexual and queer awakening.'

DOWNTOWN PHOTOGRAPHER: 'Subversive, charismatic and vehemently true to himself, Hujar walked an unconventional path, chronicling the precarious lives around him with a brilliant eye, until his premature, AIDS-related death at the age of fifty-three.'

'Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star and Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, are essential reading for the queer community, 'These two novels – both products of the very different years (2011 and 1994 respectively) in which they were written – represent the best of what “gay literature” has to offer us.'

Remembering Divine on the 30th Anniversary of her death, 'I love Divine because she was a drag queen like no other: fabulously fat, fearlessly confrontational, effortlessly funny. Divine died nearly 30 years ago on March 7, 1988, at just 42 years of age, but her legacy lives on in every queen who busts out of the mould and stomps right across the line of good taste.'

'And as the world we live in seems increasingly strange and ominous, comfort yourself by remembering that only last year a tiny film about black queer kids was the Best Picture at the Oscars. And that this year, an LGBT film where the greatest threat to the characters lives is heartbreak, could do the exact same thing.'

Author of A Single Man and Goodbye To Berlin - which would become the Oscar winning film Caberet, 'Homosexual lust they could laugh at, now, and tolerate in a sophisticated way. Homosexual love they put to death by denial.'

'Trans role-models, in art, film and music come few and far between. Sure, they exist, however as a child I had no outlet. I had conflicted feelings. I knew I was different. I felt detached from my body and had no means of articulating that...'

The Harlem Renaissance Man: 'Black people invented swag! This is an undeniable truth that is not up for debate. With that said, around the world our history along with our impact and influence on culture, commerce and art is usually or completely swept underneath the rug. As an African-American I couldn’t tell you much about my culture if I solely based my knowledge on what I was taught in the American public school system.'

The Dandy: "Bunny Roger didn’t so much defy convention as eviscerate it. In his eighty-six years of life he was an aesthete and businessman; a muscular homosexualist and a dandy with a 29-inch waist; a couturier and war hero; avaricious and the greatest giver of parties in the later part of the twentieth century."

"Frank’s films were all so wildly ahead of their time, rooted in their historic moment by the force of his voice singing out in each whip-smart turn of phrase, parsed to perfection. He made sitting in a cinema feel like overhearing a succession of brilliant conversations on a bus."

Juno Roche on photographer Lola Flash, 'Activism is tough, despite the insidious attempts across social media to denigrate it with accusations of 'snowflakery' smothering free speech, activism - seeking to create a better, kinder world is draining.'

"The mere fact that someone who lived half a millennium ago was willing to put their reputation — possibly even their life — on the line to outwardly present as a “sodomite” is, to me anyway, inspiring enough."

'As my favourite DIY banner put it, “NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, QUEER AS IN FUCK YOU”. My kind of queer. The kind of queer I think of as my version of Sarah Kane. Dark, aggressive, unhappy but not in the way you might have assumed - someone who knows the pleasure of misery.'

"At the apex of his fame, George created an iconic image - stubble, sunglasses, badass leather jacket - that led to him being presented as a heterosexual sex symbol. This wasn't quite the real George, who was gradually realising behind closed doors that he was probably - definitely - a gay man."

"It’s almost impossible to explain what it feels like to grow up gay if you’ve only grown up straight. For me, there was no flashbulb moment, no Big Bang realisation... Your sense of sexual self ebbs and flows with the gossip of the playground. Of course I’m not... but am I?"

Harriet Verney writes about her late aunt, fashion icon Isabella Blow. "It was the early naughties and Izzy was at her most exuberant. The outfits were getting more elaborate, bigger, more in danger of getting caught in a closing door and generally wilder. The hats were getting taller, more intricate and louder while Izzy’s fame was reaching its peak."